Letdown might be swan song for Tacoma skater Boutiette

TURIN, Italy -- For every hero-from-nowhere story at the Olympics, there's maybe a dozen crash-and-burn dramas littering the edges of the podium.

Sometimes both story lines rest in the same athlete, waiting for some capricious pivot point.

Wednesday night, the story swung the wrong way for speedskater KC Boutiette.

On the edge of a gee-whizzer -- in his fourth and final Olympics, the one-time wunderkind from Tacoma's Mount Tahoma High School was upon his last, best shot at a medal at age 36 -- Boutiette not only crashed and burned, he took someone big down with him.

Teammate Chad Hedrick, the bodacious Texan who was theorized by some to have a decent shot at equaling Eric Heiden's outrageous record of five gold medals in a single Winter Olympics, lost out because Boutiette couldn't keep up in the arcane new event of team pursuit.

"I talked to him after the race," Hedrick said. "He was crying and said he gave it his all. I said the toughest thing for him was having to live with knowing he fell behind with two laps to go."

Composed afterward, Boutiette blamed a poor team race strategy, dodged a question about the team's makeup and launched into a screed about the lack of support for speedskating. What rang truest was a quick sentence in his river of words that stuck like a log against a trestle abutment.

"I'm not a young buck anymore."

Once he was a pioneer, the first of what has become a flood of in-line skaters moving onto the rosters of long- and short-track Olympic teams. A year after trying on skates, he made the 1994 Olympic team in Lillehammer. In 1996, he was the U.S. Olympic Committee's athlete of the year. He was in the Nagano Olympics in 1998, and in 2002 in Salt Lake City, he was fifth in the 5,000-meter race.

Now, Boutiette is the team's oldest member, a warrior in decline. In the moments after the cold blast of reality, he was struggling with new truths.

"Who knows?" he said, answering a question about whether this was his last attempt at an Olympic medal. "I love skating. I'd like to retire, but I still love it. Maybe I'll make my own pro team, be a manager/coach, something like that. The next Olympics are in Vancouver, right up the street from Seattle. Maybe we can start a new league ...

"It would have been nice to get a medal to get some attention for that."

Boutiette is so steeped in the culture of this small world that his wife is Jennifer Rodriguez, one of the team's top female skaters and a three-time Olympian, and lives with her half the year in the Netherlands, where the Dutch are consumed with speedskating.

So going out this way was grim, and not at all how NBC prefers its scripts.

Team pursuit is a new trick for an old dog in another attempt to catch the elusive youth market. But since there are no collisions, cleavage or other video-game detritus, it seems like an awkward attempt at hipness. Sort of like Grandma doing her 50 Cent rap impression.

Three skaters from two teams start on opposite sides of the track for eight laps, racing against the clock rather than each other. Each team's finish time is when the third, not the first, racer crosses the line.

Only eight teams were entered in this Olympics, so the U.S. had to like its odds of medaling, especially with Hedrick and Derek Parra, a two-medal winner in Salt Lake.

But speedskating is an individual sport, and therein lies the rub -- which skaters want to burn energy in a dubious new team gig when they've built their careers on something else?

While the team pursuit has been around at World Cups for a couple of years, they're an end-of-meet novelty. At the Olympics, it's in the middle of the speedskating schedule, meaning skaters have to decide about participation, then coaches have to decide how to deploy them, knowing that most have big individual races over the next few days.

With two races Wednesday and up to two in tonight's medals round, no team uses their best athletes for all four. The U.S. was further hurt when a top skater, Shani Davis, wanted no part of the pursuit. That elevated Boutiette to a race he probably shouldn't have been in.

In the first race, strictly for seeding teams by time, the Americans finished seventh, pitting them against No. 2 seed Italy in the second round. The well-regarded Italians were energized by the home-ice advantage at Oval Lingotto and caught up to the Americans' time halfway though.

Each skater takes turns leading while the others conserve energy drafting behind him, and then are allowed to push one another ahead. But according to Hedrick and Boutiette, the Yanks had a flawed strategy. Instead of having Hedrick, the Yanks' biggest, strongest and fastest skater, in the No. 3 position pushing his smaller compatriots, he led.

That left Boutiette and his flagging energy to drop farther and farther behind Hedrick and teammate Ryan Leveille. At the finish, Hedrick and Leveille beat the Italians, but Boutiette was at least 10 meters behind.

Despite having the second-best team time of the day, the U.S. was eliminated.

"Our best bet," said Boutiette, "would have been to have Chad back, but nobody was really ... it was kinda unfortunate he was in front of me. Once he was there, I could be in trouble. Unfortunately, that's what happened."

Asked if the team had it backward, Hedrick said, "I would believe so. If I was back there with the energy I had left, it would have been better. The strategy backfired."

No one pointed a finger at whatever coach was responsible for the dubious setup. But it also sounded as if all had been counseled to keep an already divided team from further splintering.

It is no secret that Boutiette doesn't like Davis, who irked others with his pass. The event itself is an artifice, and dropped into a schedule with apparent recklessness. Since the women also failed to qualify for tonight's finals, the day was a U.S. mess. Hedrick tried his best to paper it over.

"I expected KC to stay in there, and he'd done it extremely well before," he said. "I had confidence in the team, and I did my best. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get the job done."

Whoever did what to whom will take some sorting, but there is no doubt Hedrick has missed on gold and Boutiette has left his final career chord unresolved.